Universalove is an Austrian/Serbian/Luxembourgian movie, directed by Thomas Woschitz.

Plot:
In six episodes set in six different places, the nature of relationship is explored.
In Belgrade, Milja (Anica Dobra) and Dusan (Dusan Askovic) love each other, but can’t stand each other.
In Marseilles, Julie (Liza Machover) and Rachid (Samir Menouar) are in love, but Rachid is in deep trouble.
In Luxembourg, Luc (Sascha Migge) and Ben (Daniel Plier) have an affair, but Luc is married.
In Rio de Janeiro, Maria (Magda Gomes) has the hots for Soap Opera star João (Erom Cordeiro), who she meets by accident, quite literally.
In Tokyo, IT technician Satoshi (Kyoichi Komoto) falls in love with Natsumi (Makiko Kawai), who he only ever saw a on a client’s video.
In New York, Sean (Damien Smith) thinks his longtime girlfriend Mary (Sri Gordon) is cheating on him.

Universalove has a great soundtrack by Naked Lunch, and the actors are fine, but unfortunately the rest disappoints. The episodes are too short to create any emotional connection to the characters and the stories remain pointless.

[SPOILERS]

I have to admit that I probably would have fallen asleep during this movie, if it weren’t for Maria and João’s story. And there it was more my Brasilian connection than the story itself that kept me awake.

While I didn’t care about the other stories, there was one that I found really creepy: Satoshi is stalking Natsumi – and it’s called love? What the hell? I mean, I know that stalkery vampires are supposedly romantic but do we really have to carry on this tradition?

But I was really bothered by the seeming pointlessness of the stories. It never amounted to anything, didn’t have some kind of ending, or climax or anything. And sometimes – especially Ben and Luc’s segment – I didn’t even really get what was really going on. [What was that whole driving forward, driving backwards in time in that Ben and Luc segment?]

The movie was marketed as cut in music video style – which I thought would mean that it was cut pretty fast and that it would be rather loud. Instead it meant that it felt like an actual 90 minutes music video – but a slow one. While I like Naked Lunch, who really wants to watch 90 minutes of chopped up story set to more or less fitting music?

Nah, I can’t recommend this film, even if I really want to recommend Austrian movies. Listen to the soundtrack. Forget the film.